An architect, a professor, a dentist, and a teacher. Children as young as six and retirees in their 60s and 70s. Musicians and massage therapists and artists; Mainers and folks from away. All living together, sharing common space, learning to accommodate each other's whims while living their individual lives to the fullest. It's not the premise of a new reality show — it's the model for a co-housing development in Belfast that broke ground this month and will eventually comprise 36 private residences, plus common space, on 40 acres of midcoast farmland.

"It's not really houses we're selling," says Sanna McKim, one of the co-founders of the Belfast Cohousing and Ecovillage; she'll there with her husband and two children when construction is complete. "It's community. We want to have a little more to do with our neighbors."

As author and environmentalist Bill McKibben says in his introduction to the recently reissued Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities (New Society Publishers), "the average American eats meals with friends, families, neighbors, half as often as fifty years ago. The average American has half as many close friends." Thanks to technology, the pressures of money and work, and sprawl, we've become isolated, like islands.

However, whether as a result of financial necessity or as an expression of certain values, collaboration and shared resources are increasingly commonplace. (Keep in mind that tent cities are springing up all over the country.) Cohousing is nothing less than a piece of a larger movement — one that embraces community over the cold realities of the rat-race. In a society where a safety net is more crucial than ever, cohousing instills a restored sense of "neighborhood" — of caring for each other, of helping each other.

"[T]he cohousing community is a wonderful challenge, the best kind of challenge: it doesn't tsk tsk at Americans for their selfish ways, it just offers them a subtly different take on how the future might unfold," McKibben says.

Cohousing projects can coalesce around a shared interest (such as art or music), demographic (several exist purely for older citizens, for example), or design element (the Belfast homes will be extremely energy efficient), but there are some fundamental commonalities: community dinners; shared childcare responsibilities; work groups for maintenance, gardening, or farming; community government that is often based on consensus; and ongoing interaction with neighbors.

Little of this is mandatory, although misanthropes and those disinclined to participate in group activities are unlikely candidates for cohousing; most communities require that residents sign up to cook one group meal every month or few months, with such common dinners occurring once or twice a week, and commit to a certain number of maintenance, landscaping, or home-improvement hours per month or year. In a high-functioning cohousing system, expectations regarding participation are clear, as are consequences.

In some ways, the cohousing village is like an enhanced condo association with communal perks and shared values. Residents have their own income sources — the community does not serve as a revenue-generator, except in rare instances — and homes are individually owned and financed.

Scarcelli’s firm takes heat in Mississippi Former gubernatorial and prospective US Senate candidate Rosa Scarcelli has had a lot of bad press of late, courtesy of her husband's role in creating an anonymous website that sought to smear another Blaine House candidate, Eliot Cutler. Now the company Scarcelli runs is being pilloried in southwestern Mississippi, apparently on account of the actions of her mother.

Portland's neighborhood prosecutor cleans up the city When Portland Police Chief James Craig announced at a June 28 press conference that he was leaving the city to become Cincinnati's chief, he took a moment to list what he considered to be the highlights of his two-year tenure.

A house is not a home The Maine State Housing Authority has such an off-putting name that it prefers to use a pseudonym.

Get it done Unity College, a small school in Waldo County with a focus on environmental issues, announced this year that it will pull its investments from the fossil-fuel industry — underscoring that institutions of higher education have a responsibility to address climate change.

Bill McKibben’s climate change crusade comes to Providence Environmental activist and journalist Bill McKibben was at the heart of the remarkable uprising that forced President Obama to delay approval of the Keystone pipeline, which would funnel oil from the tar sands of Canada to the Gulf Coast.

Harvard students push for fossil-fuel divestment Throughout 350.org's Do the Math tour this month, climate-change warrior Bill McKibben has blasted Harvard, his alma mater, for the school's failure to fully divest from South African companies two decades ago.

Review: Margin Call The financial crisis of 2008 awaits its Social Network; until then we have Margin Call, which zaps its credibility from the get-go when a downsized risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) openly passes a flash drive to an underling (Zachary Quinto) as he's escorted him from the building by security.

Heavy burden In 2012, collections on homes, buildings, and private infrastructure will feed more than 65 percent of Boston's $2.4 billion budget.

Truth to power It's the end of the world as we know it in author and environmental journalist Bill McKibben's latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (St. Martin's Griffin).

ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE | July 24, 2014 When three theater companies, all within a one-hour drive of Portland, choose to present the same Shakespeare play on overlapping dates, you have to wonder what about that particular show resonates with this particular moment.

CHECKING IN: THE NEW GUARD AND THE WRITER'S HOTEL | July 11, 2014 Former Mainer Shanna McNair started The New Guard, an independent, multi-genre literary review, in order to exalt the writer, no matter if that writer was well-established or just starting out.

NO TAR SANDS | July 10, 2014 “People’s feelings are clear...they don’t want to be known as the tar sands capitol of the United States."